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The COLOSS BEEBOOK, a Manual of Standard

Methods for Honey Bee Research

Norman L. Carreck, Vincent Dietemann, James D. Ellis, Jay D. Evans, Peter

Neumann & Panuwan Chantawannakul

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 Article

The COLOSS BEEBOOK, a Manual of

Standard Methods for Honey Bee
Research
Norman L. Carreck , Vincent Dietemann , James D. Ellis ,
Jay D. Evans , Peter Neumann and Panuwan Chantawannakul

The Vision
The BEEBOOK project arose from
discussions at early COLOSS
(Prevention of Honey Bee COlony
LOSSes) meetings. The vision was, and
still is, to develop a definitive inventory
of standard techniques and methods in
honey bee research to ensure that
studies performed by different laborato-
ries around the world would be directly
comparable. The manual, titled the
COLOSS BEEBOOK, was inspired by
publications with similar purposes for
Drosophila fruit fly research (Williams
et al., 2012). The previous lack of
standards had made, for example,
establishing whether honey bee colony
losses had indeed increased, or were
greater in some countries than in others,
exceptionally difficult. The BEEBOOK is
not meant to standardize the research
itself, but focusses solely on the meth-
ods for which standardization is useful
to enable reproducibility as a corner-
stone of science. The BEEBOOK is a tool
for all who want to conduct research on
honey bees. It has been written in such a
way that those new to honey bee
research can use it to begin studies in
fields with which they may not be
familiar.
Creation
Production of the BEEBOOK began after
recruiting international experts to lead the
compilation of each research domain.
These senior authors (first in the author
list) were tasked with recruiting a suitable
international team of contributors to
select methods to be used as standards
and then to report the methods in a
user-friendly manner (Williams et al.,
2012).
The initial BEEBOOK was divided into
three volumes: The COLOSS BEEBOOK,
Volume I: Standard methods for Apis mel-
lifera research; The COLOSS BEEBOOK,
DOI: 10.1080/0005772X.2021.1981677
© 2021 International Bee Research Association.
Volume II: Standard methods for Apis
mellifera pest and pathogen research;
and The COLOSS BEEBOOK, Volume
III: Standard methods for Apis mellifera
product research (Figure 1). The first two
volumes of the COLOSS BEEBOOK were
published in 2013 (Figure 2). The final
chapters of Volume III were published
in 2021 and a hard copy volume will be
published shortly.
A Global Enterprise
The BEEBOOK is a truly international
collaboration. In Volume I, 167 interna-
tional scientists from 29 countries
collaborated to produce 18 chapters
including over a thousand protocols
related to studying honey bees and their
colonies. For Volume II, 98 international
scientists from 22 countries collaborated
to produce 12 chapters including over 500
protocols. Volume III represents the work
of 133 authors from 26 countries spanning
five continents.
One Book, Multiple Forms
Each BEEBOOK chapter has been
published as an open access peer-reviewed
article in the Journal of Apicultural
Research (JAR). The .pdf papers can be
downloaded free to view directly from the
Taylor & Francis online platform for JAR
and through the COLOSS website: https://
coloss.org/. They are also available as hard
copy books (Dietemann et al., 2013a,
2013b), and can be purchased from the
IBRA bookshop: https://ibra.org.uk/shop
or from Amazon.
A Standard beyond Others
The reader may wonder about the
difference between the BEEBOOK and
existing standards provided by the Office
International des Epizooties (OIE) and the
European Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD).
In the BEEBOOK, we often refer to OIE,
OECD, and other standards, since they
describe methods to diagnose pests and
diseases (OIE) or to perform, for example,
routine analyses for toxicity tests (OECD).
The BEEBOOK, however, goes well
beyond diagnosis and routine analyses by
describing the methods to perform
research on the honey bee, its colony, hive
products, and associated organisms.
Where necessary, the BEEBOOK recog-
nizes existing standards such as those
provided by the OIE and OECD, and
presents a harmonized compendium of
research methods, written and reviewed
by an international team of scientists.
User Acceptance
With the completion of the original three
volumes of the COLOSS BEEBOOK, we
now explore whether it has, as hoped,
been fully adopted by the bee science
community as an aid to collaborative
science and the development of our
understanding of honey bees. There are
several measures of its use. One is the
number of citations of the chapters in
other scientific papers. The CrossRef
database in August 2021 showed a total of
2,300 citations to BEEBOOK chapters. The
citations are accumulating at a rate of
approximately 50 per month. The rate of
citation has increased greatly in the last
two years, and the most highly cited
chapters are those on Nosema (Fries et al.,
2013; 196 citations), Varroa (Dietemann
et al., 2013c; 177 citations) and viruses (de
Miranda et al., 2013; 156 citations).
Another measure of adoption by the
scientific community is the number of
times that individual chapters are
downloaded. The chapters from Volumes I
and II had 2,986 downloads from the
IBRA website between January 2013 and
September 2014, before JAR was trans-
ferred to the Taylor & Francis Online
platform in April 2015. Since that time,
there have been nearly 180,000 downloads
Bee World • Page 1
Article
Article
a 
Figure 1.  The first three COLOSS BEEBOOK volumes.
a 
Figure2.  The launch of the first two volumes of the COLOSS BEEBOOK, Kiev, Ukraine,
September 2013. L to R: Norman Carreck, Jamie Ellis, Peter Neumann and Vincent
Dietemann.
of BEEBOOK chapters, including the
Volume III chapters published more
recently. This is roughly 6,500 downloads
per month, or an average of 170 per
chapter per month. The propolis chapter
(Bankova et al., 2019) has been especially
popular, having been downloaded over
20,800 times since its original online
publication in September 2016, now
making it the most heavily downloaded
paper from the more than two thousand
published in JAR over its 60-year history.
Beyond Apis mellifera
The field of bee science has much to gain
from the development of research on the
Eastern honey bee, Apis cerana.
Correspondingly, experts on this species
from the COLOSS network have collabo-
rated to share technical experiences on
specific techniques for A. cerana research
in Volume IV, “Standard methods for Apis
cerana research”, which is currently being
Page 2 • Bee World
prepared. This will provide standard
methods for general research on A. cerana
and research on its pests, pathogens, and
hive products. More information on
Eastern honey bees will provide greater
insight into the evolution and host-parasite
relationships of Apis species.
Not Only for Scientists!
The unique BEEBOOK project has been
fully embraced by the honey bee research
community, and the numbers of citations
that the papers receive are encouraging.
Although many COLOSS members are
research scientists, and the first volumes
of the BEEBOOK concentrated mainly on
scientific techniques, many other mem-
bers work in agricultural extension
services and have the task of disseminat-
ing scientific knowledge to beekeepers.
Therefore BEEBOOK Volume V, “Standard
methods for sustainable beekeeping”, is in
the planning stages and will follow the
format of earlier volumes. Global princi-
ples will be summarized by international
contributors who will detail regional
variations in beekeeping techniques due
to local conditions.
An Evolving Tool
The BEEBOOK was, from the outset,
intended as an evolving tool, keeping
pace with the development of new
methods and the improvement of
existing ones. The field of molecular
methods for honey bee research has
experienced a rapid evolution since the
first publication of Evans et al. (2013),
especially with the development of
“‘omics methods” namely: genomics, the
study of the structure, function, evolu-
tion and mapping of genomes (the
genetic makeup of an organism);
proteomics, the study of genes coding
for proteins and their function; and
metabolomics, the study of the genetic
basis of an organism’s metabolism (the
chemical processes within an organism
that sustain life). Since it is the COLOSS
BEEBOOK’s purpose to compile the
most up to date methods, we are
currently including a chapter focused on
“Standard methods for Apis ‘omics
research” in Volume IV. This chapter will
cover the immense changes in sequenc-
ing and analytics related to full-genome
analyses of honey bees and functional
insights into bee health, development,
reproduction, and behavior. It will also
cover new work comparing the genomes
and biologies of multiple Apis species,
including A. cerana, and the emergent
field of metabolomics, which can use
protein and biochemical insights to
describe the multitude of important
chemical processes that occur inside
bees. This chapter will provide methods,
resources, and a roadmap to online
genomic and genetic databases that will
be useful for researchers.
It was recognized at the start of the
BEEBOOK project that new threats to
bees and new areas of interest would
emerge and would need to be added. For
example, the yellow legged Asian hornet
Vespa velutina was at the BEEBOOK’s
inception not considered of significance
to western honey bees. However, in the
last few years, this view has changed as
many parts of Europe now experience its
harmful effects. Correspondingly, a new
chapter on V. velutina is being written.
This provides an example of how the
BEEBOOK can evolve to include new
areas of research not previously consid-
ered relevant to honey bees.

Inevitably, as new techniques are devel-
oped, some of the BEEBOOK chapters
will become outdated. Thus, several of the
original chapters are now being updated.
Following contact with the initial author
teams, we can report that interest has been
expressed updating several of the original
chapters. In some cases, the original lead
author will be coordinating the revision,
but in many cases, newer and younger
authors have now joined the teams. In this
way, the BEEBOOK project will continue
to develop and evolve for the foreseeable
future.
In conclusion, the BEEBOOK is one
of COLOSS’s most successful, impact-
ful, and enduring outputs to date. We
believe it will continue to impact honey
bee research globally for decades to
come. We also believe it is a fitting
testimony to the accomplishments made
when scientists work together with com-
mon purpose.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank the many
international authors and numerous
reviewers who wrote and refereed the
BEEBOOK. We would also like to thank
the International Bee Research
Association and the Journal of Apicultural
Research editorial team, Taylor & Francis
Ltd, and Northern Bee Books for making
its publication possible. The COLOSS
network is supported by the Ricola
Foundation – Nature & Culture,
Vetopharma and the Eva Crane Trust as
well as numerous local sponsors. P.C.
acknowledges the Ricola foundation
Nature & Culture and Chiang Mai
University for supporting Eastern honey
bee research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was
­reported by the authors.
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